In optical communication systems, the speed at which information is transmitted is limited by the pulse rate of the source. The pulse rate has been increased to about 20 GHz by the use of mode-locking laser diodes.
Likewise, the clock rate limits the speed of optical computing. Unlike optical communication systems, however, the same mode-locked laser diodes cannot be used alone to increase the clock rate in optical computing. This is so because optical computing requires, in addition to computing speed, high average power to acces a large number of parallel operations simultaneously. The many separate logical elements must be driven from a single clock source. The problem with the prior art is the lack of a laser source which produces high power pulses at a high repetition rate.